1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink-jet recording apparatus for printing a pattern by ejecting ink drops from nozzle ports onto a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a typical ink-jet recording apparatus employs a recording head so constructed as to eject ink drops from nozzle ports by pressurizing ink in a pressure generating chamber by means of a piezo-electric element and a heat generating element, the apparatus needs means for preventing printing-quality deterioration due to the drying of ink near the nozzle ports and the adhesion of dust thereto.
One known method that has been adopted to solve the problem above is to move the recording head to a capping unit installed in a standby position each time the printing operation continues for a predetermined length of time, for example, 20 seconds, and a so-called flushing operation is caused to be performed in order to discharge ink drops from the whole nozzle port, so that the nozzle ports are prevented from being clogged with viscous ink sticking thereto.
On arrival of the timing of the flushing operation on a side opposite to the side where the capping unit is disposed, however, the flushing operation has to be performed by interrupting the printing operation in order to move the recording head to the capping position. The problem is that the time required for idle traveling is wasteful and this results in lowering the printing speed.
In order to solve this problem, the ink-jet recording apparatus has been proposed such that an ink receptacle is disposed on both sides of recording paper and, on arrival of flushing timing, a recording head is moved to one of the ink receptacles which is situated closer thereto so that the recording head undergoes flushing.
With the aforementioned arrangement, it is possible to improve the printing speed because the time required for the idle travel of the recording head is reduced as long as the flushing operation is concerned. When, however, recording paper particularly narrow in width is used for printing, there develops a problem in that the printing speed is rather low for its size as the idle travel distance is extended since the ink receptacles are positioned in synchronization with the maximum recordable width of recording paper.